“Life goes on without me”… these are the last words uttered by Marlene Dietrich in her last film, Just a Gigolo, directed by David Hemmings (1979). This is the springboard for the production of three short films made with Stéphanie Ditche and Christophe Pelley (with In The Night and The Harder The Fall), fiction films where all the ripostes consist of actors’ “last words”. It was also a chance to make a movie, very simply, in my apartment at Charenton-le-Pont, about faces, with no screenplay, driven by my desire to bring together in one place people I like and love, to see what happens. Pina Bausch’s recent death, and the participation of one of her dancers (Thusnelda Mercy) meant that the film was distributed, and there was that round of questions and absences where everyone calls out and looks in a direction that shies away. With, in the end, dance coming to open a window towards a promise of tomorrow, a party?

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Italy is the antithesis of that indoor short. An open film, in motion, shot solely outside in the streets of the 13th arrondissement in Paris. A very scripted film (four years of different screenplay versions), produced, shot in 35 mm, with a crew of fifteen people. A film which tries to grasp a vocabulary: walking and movement/displacement as a principle of fiction, the adventure of the itinerary acting like narrative accidents; romance and sentiment as plot, which words bring on; lastly, dance and song as resolution and miracle. Italy is a manifesto, in it I bring together in portrait form the principles of what links me to film: a country that you desire and which steals away as you try to draw closer to it, a love story which is a mooring from which to drift off, and the city made up of emergences and appearances to open us up to the unknown, and new stories. Arnold Pasquier